Resort victim of Jack the Stripper

The Blackpool victim of one of London’s most notorious serial killers is to feature in a new book this month – and a TV documentary on the Crime and Investigation channel next month.

Helene Barthelemy, 22, was the third victim of Jack the Stripper, who brutally murdered eight young women in London’s Hammersmith district in the ’60s.

Like Jack the Ripper years earlier, he targeted lone prostitutes, and was never brought to justice. Alfred Hitchcock’s spine chilling thriller Frenzy was based loosely on the slayings.

In a tragic twist of fate, Blackpool prostitute Helene, chose to stay in London, rather than return to the resort after her release, on appeal, from prison, for a crime committed in her home town.

It cost her her life. Single mother Helene was later found strangled and stripped in an alley in Brentford, her teeth taken for souvenirs, a trademark trait of the killer, and body flecked with spray paint. A massive police hunt failed to find the man responsible for what the press called the Hammersmith Nude Murders.

Today, nearly 50 years on, amateur detective and crime writer Neil Milkins has linked the deaths to the killer of two children in his home town of Abertillery in 1921.

Milkins says a series of “uncanny coincidences” places convicted child killer Harold Jones, who died in 1971, at the heart of the East End when the killings occurred.

His new book, Who Was Jack the Stripper? will be published by Rose Heyworth press on Monday. Specialist criminologists claim it contains “compelling new evidence.” Crime author and TV host Fred Dinenage will present the case in a TV documentary in the Murder Casebook Series on May 29.

Blackpool man David Robinson, who knew Helene, said: “She was the original hooker with a heart of gold and didn’t deserve to die like this. The Helene I remember, who used to hang out with other good time girls until the early hours at a burger bar, would do anything to help anyone.